


Bound

by sarasara



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, The Last Jedi
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-20
Updated: 2018-10-28
Packaged: 2019-02-17 12:48:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13077213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarasara/pseuds/sarasara
Summary: After Kylo Ren kills Snoke, Rey is taken captive on board the Supremacy. The First Order achieves a crushing victory, and Rey is now bound to the new Supreme Leader physically as well as mentally. But the story has only just begun. This is the darkest timeline.





	1. Imprisoned

Lights fell in burning arcs down through the air. Burning embers streaked down meteoric behind his face and coppered his pale skin with their molten glow, his pale skin golden in the golden light though shrouded in black, his tall frame like a shadow made solid moving darkly over the scarred metal surface beneath his feet. Each step echoed hollow in the chamber now emptied of all but the last two. He stepped slow steps past the tattered crimson shreds of livery of the guards lying on the floor.

He stopped at the foot of the throne.

‘Ben,’ Rey heard her voice, quivering like the flames before her.

He stood in silence for a moment heavy with thought. He stared at the throne and the dead thing crumpled on it, body torn from legs, and he spoke, his voice rough with his breathing. ‘It’s time to let old things die. Snoke.’ He turned to her, ‘Skywalker. The Sith. The Jedi. The Rebels. Let it all die.’ As he spoke he walked towards her, where she stood feet rooted to the floor.

‘Rey,’ said Kylo Ren, and he extended his hand. ‘I want you to join me. We can rule together, and bring a new order to the galaxy.’ His voice was bolder now, but it was a fragile uncertain boldness like that of a young boy fearing heartbreak. He stretched out his blackly gloved fingers to her.

Rey’s eyes grew distant as if she were looking through him. Something in her expression sunk and he felt the same sinking deep within his throat. She shook her head as she spoke as if pleading but hope already had abandoned her eyes. She said ‘Don’t do this, Ben. Please don’t go this way.’ Her voice cracked and weak.

Kylo Ren’s face contorted into anger. ‘No, no! You’re still holding on! Let go!’ he shouted at her. He waved his extended hand at her a gesticulation of fury towards this girl who stood in front of him after all that he had done for her and all that he offered her still so faraway and unseeing. He lowered it and calmed his voice and spoke in measured tone to her. ‘Do you want to know the truth about your parents?’

Rey swallowed a dark lump in her throat.

He went on. ‘Or have you always known? You’ve just hidden it away.’ He started towards her, closer still, until he was over her, looking down at her while her dewy eyes looked up at him and her breath came shaky through her trembling lips. ‘You know the truth. Say it.’ He watched a tear on the verge of falling down her cheek. ‘Say it,’ he repeated.

Rey swallowed to find her voice. ‘They were nobody,’ she said. She held her mouth closed to keep her face composed as she felt the first and second tears start to fall.

‘They were filthy junk traders,’ he said. ‘Who sold you off for drinking money. They’re dead, in a pauper’s grave, in the Jakku desert.’ His lip curled as he spoke of them. But now his expression was softer. ‘You have no place in this story,’ he said to her. ‘You come from nothing. You’re nothing.’

She nodded as if to better bear the hurt, and she closed her eyes stained red with tears and breathed slowly so that she would not sob in front of him.

‘But not to me,’ he said.

Rey opened her eyes and saw him. And for the first time she saw conviction in him.

He held out his hand to her again. ‘Join me,’ he said.

She looked down at his hand. His fingers moved again as if to extend themselves in offer a second time.

‘Please,’ he said.

Rey moved her hand up until her fingertips were barely a breath away from his. She looked up to his face and saw his eyes like two cracks in a mask of cold sternness and pride full of pleading and for one moment that was all that was in the world, only the two of them in all the world and she felt how easy it would be to take his hand and make it so.

She felt his fingers so close to hers she could almost feel the ghost of their presence, waiting for her hand and all she had to do was give it. Yet there remained something in her which went against all desire and she knew she could not give what he asked even though what she knew she would do tore her heart in two.

She felt her lightsaber leave his belt and fly towards her hand, and she saw his eyes widen and his eyes were just like a boy’s, and then the expression was gone behind his fury. His hand went out after the lightsaber and he matched her own power with his own, and the two of them were pushed back across the debris-strewn floor while the lightsaber hovered in conflict between them, until at last there was an explosion of blinding light and then darkness took them both.

* * *

General Hux walked in amongst the wreckage which encircled the throne. He stared at the lifeless body of the Supreme Leader and the bodies of the guards, before he turned to Kylo Ren and, sneering, reached for his blaster.

Kylo Ren returned to consciousness with a twitch of his arm and his leg. His eyes opened. He turned around to see Hux standing arms at his sides, surveying the chaotic scene.

‘What happened?’ demanded Hux, his eyes fixing on Kylo Ren with cold ire.

Kylo Ren got to his feet and walked past him, to where Rey still lay, unconscious on her side. He looked down at her peaceful face. In that moment even he did not know his own thoughts. ‘The girl,’ he said. ‘She killed Snoke.’

He turned away from her. To Hux he said, ‘Take her prisoner. I want her alive. Nobody but me is to access her cell.’

General Hux’s face twisted into a scowl of rage. He shrieked at Kylo Ren, ‘The Supreme Leader is dead!’ and one foot stepping towards him, before his legs buckled and he dropped to his knees grasping at his throat and gasping for breath as his face reddened with blood. And he sputtered out through his teeth, ‘Long live the Supreme Leader!’

Kylo Ren let his hand drop and released Hux, who clutched at his neck, his head down to hide his face of conjoined humiliation and hatred. ‘Make sure her cell is properly guarded. The guards do not speak to her under any circumstances.’

‘Yes, Supreme Leader,’ hissed General Hux.

As Kylo Ren swept from the room already six stormtroopers marched by him double-file. He turned to watch them as two of them lifted her and the others went two in front and two behind. He saw Hux looking back at him, and he turned away.

The Supremacy crawled on.


	2. Cells, Interlinked

When Rey awoke she awoke to a red-black nothingness. A visible darkness which encroached from all angles as if crawling in along an infinity of arcs on the sphere of her still diminished vision, enshrouded her in a schizoid murk which swallowed the walls before her and stretched on to unknown depths beyond. What light there was was from a solitary ocular thing which glowed faintly crimson. Near it, there was the outline of a door, which had in it a small slit. She closed her eyes and drifted away.

She briefly awoke again, to nothing new, and again, to nothing new, and then to a small dish tossed in through the opening and closing of the slit in the door, and when she could move she pulled herself along the featureless floor to eat what she could. When eating had consumed her strength she fell on her back to the floor, where she lay with her arms outstretched. Her hair fell over her shoulders. She did not know how many days she had spent here. It didn’t matter.

She tried to meditate. It was pointless. Her mind was always unclear, her thoughts whirling around, and around, like the titanic sandstorms do, around that one focal point. Ben Solo. All her thoughts returned to him. She thought of her friends, but most of them would be dead now. Ben had destroyed the Resistance fleet. Leia, his own mother. Gone, she could feel it. Finn, gone. She didn’t want to think of the Resistance anymore.

Why had she joined them in the first place? She thought she was doing the right thing. But what had that helped? All her efforts to do the right thing were for nothing. She hadn’t done the right thing, even when she tried. She failed Luke. She failed the Resistance. She hadn’t become a Jedi. She hadn’t even learned anything. No, she didn’t join to do the right thing. She’d just done as all orphans do, only to be orphaned again.

At last, tired of her thoughts, she lay down to sleep..

When she woke next she was still dreaming. She saw herself on the bridge of a large black ship, the scene before her of a sky full of fighters and battlecruisers, and to her left, the tall figure of Ben, his hair blacker still than the void behind it.

That pale face turned to her, and she felt her breath fail her. Her body felt light, from her chest to her head.

He opened his mouth to say something.

Rey turned away. ‘I don’t care,’ she said.

And she woke up.

* * *

Rey didn’t want to stay awake, but if she slept she might dream. She sat against the wall in her dark cell, and rolled her dish along the floor, until it bounced off the opposite wall and returned to her. Back and forth like a pendulum, the only measure of time in the long nothing between her next slivers of food.

Maybe she should’ve stayed on the island. Would things have been better that way? But she knew that would never have happened. That kind of cowardice made her blood thick with revulsion. Whatever she did, for better or for worse, she couldn’t do nothing at all.

Alone in her cell, she slowly started to clear her mind of thoughts, to let the stream of consciousness flow by her and not overwhelm her, to steadily regain control of herself. When she thought of Ben, when she thought of all those she knew who were now gone, all her failures, she let those thoughts pass her, held herself from sorrow’s undertow.

She let the Force come to her. The Force. That overwhelming feeling, like a boundless ocean that flowed through all things. There were the walls of her cells, the cavernous dreadnought beyond it, and there, past the crude matter, there were the glimmering lights of all the living beings, walking up and down the corridors, resting, coming and going, people come from all parts of the galaxy, and further down, where the Force drew her as gravity does, to that presence which so thoroughly drowned out all others.

Oh, how she did wish that were true. How much she wanted it to feel that way.

Was she still so naive?

No, here the Force was not like the flow of an ocean. No. Here, it was sewage. Here were twisted little things which crawled all through the intestines of the beast like an infestation, not lights but swirling pits of darkness, life brought together to destroy more life, their bad intentions seeping into her, their presence so sickening she felt as if a hand twisted itself around her throat.

Distance – she let the Force carry her through it at a distance, away from the deepest darkness at the bridge of the ship, out of the dreadnought, away, where there was only the Force. Without thoughts. Without death. Without failure. Without memory. Where there was only the Force and all was the Force.

What should I do?

What should I do?

Please.

Help me.

She let herself fall into the Force, untethered from her body, and she heard only an echoing silence.

At last Rey began to understand.

If only she had listened before. She was listening now.


End file.
